Quotes about Philosophy

Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths.

a person who thinks should not try to persuade others to his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the man of conviction; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the man of conviction is a man restricted.

Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?

The dispute between those who believe that the world was created by God and those who think it came into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond our reason and experience. Much more real is the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation.

You know,' he went on, 'novels are the fruit of the human illusion that we can understand our fellow man. But what do we know about each other?' 'Nothing,' said Bibi. 'True,' said Joujou. The professor of philosophy acquiesced with a nod of the head. 'The only thing we can do,' said Banaka, 'is to give an account of our own selves. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie.

the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear [...] without the mitigating circumstances of their transitory nature

Is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain. ? Milan Kundera, Immortality (Gardners Books; 1st edition, July 31, 2000) Originally published January 12th 1990.

What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have hap-pened at all. If we have only one life to live,we might as well not have lived at all.